Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup
Posted by thinkingemote 5 days ago
Comments
Comment by Antibabelic 5 days ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Comment by jcattle 5 days ago
"Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
Lots of those points seems to get into the same idea which seems like a good balance. It's the language itself that is problematic, not how the text itself came to be, so makes sense to 100% target what language the text is.
Hopefully those guidelines make all text on Wikipedia better, not just LLM produced ones, because they seem like generally good guidelines even outside the context of LLMs.
Comment by Antibabelic 5 days ago
"Peacock example:
Bob Dylan is the defining figure of the 1960s counterculture and a brilliant songwriter.
Just the facts:
Dylan was included in Time's 100: The Most Important People of the Century, in which he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". By the mid-1970s, his songs had been covered by hundreds of other artists."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
Comment by foobarchu 5 days ago
The real tell on those tends to be weirdly time-specific claims that tend to be wildly outdated ("currently touring with XYZ")
Comment by mrweasel 5 days ago
Comment by lacunary 5 days ago
Comment by andrepd 5 days ago
Comment by robertjwebb 5 days ago
Comment by nottorp 5 days ago
Comment by eurekin 5 days ago
Comment by jcattle 5 days ago
Recently there has been a big push into geospatial foundation models (e.g. Google AlphaEarth, IBM Terramind, Clay).
These take in vast amounts of satellite data and with the usual Autoencoder architecture try and build embedding spaces which contain meaningful semantic features.
The issue at the moment is that in the benchmark suites (https://github.com/VMarsocci/pangaea-bench), only a few of these foundation models have recently started to surpass the basic U-Net in some of the tasks.
There's also an observation by one of the authors of the Major-TOM model, which also provides satellite input data to train models, that the scale rule does not seem to hold for geospatial foundation models, in that more data does not seem to result in better models.
My (completely unsupported) theory on why that is, is that unlike writing or coding, in satellite data you are often looking for the needle in the haystack. You do not want what has been done thousands of times before and was proven to work. Segmenting out forests and water? Sure, easy. These models have seen millions of examples of forests and water. But most often we are interested in things that are much, much rarer. Flooding, Wildfire, Earthquakes, Landslides, Destroyed buildings, new Airstrips in the Amazon, etc. etc.. But as I see it, the currently used frameworks do not support that very well.
But I'd be curious how others see this, who might be more knowledgeable in the area.
Comment by bspammer 5 days ago
From my experience with LLMs that's a great observation.
Comment by inquirerGeneral 5 days ago
Comment by Amorymeltzer 5 days ago
<https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...>
Comment by smusamashah 5 days ago
I had a bad experience at a shitty airport, went to google maps to leave a bad review, and found that its rating was 4.7 by many thousand people. Knowing that airport is run by corrupt government, I started reading those super positive reviews and the other older reviews by them. People who could barely manage few coherent sentences of English are now writing multiple paragraphs about history and vital importance of that airport in that region.
Reading first section "Undue emphasis on significance" those fake reviews is all I can think of.
Comment by cjlm 5 days ago
[0]: https://ammil.industries/signs-of-ai-writing-a-vale-ruleset/ [1]: https://vale.sh/
Comment by eddyg 5 days ago
Comment by harrisoned 5 days ago
Comment by paradite 5 days ago
Comment by zipy124 5 days ago
Comment by einrealist 5 days ago
Comment by paradite 5 days ago
I'm more thinking about startups for fine-tuning.
Comment by vintermann 5 days ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23233
I wonder if something more came out of that.
Either way, I think that generation of article text is the least useful and interesting way to use AI on Wikipedia. It's much better to do things like this paper did.
Comment by JimDabell 5 days ago
I think the biggest opportunity is building a knowledge graph based on Wikipedia and then checking against the graph when new edits are made. Detect any new assertions in the edit, check for conflicts against the graph, and bring up a warning along with a link to all the pages on Wikipedia that the new edit is contradicting. If the new edit is bad, it shows the editor why with citations, and if the new edit is correcting something that Wikipedia currently gets incorrect, then it shows all the other places that also need to be corrected.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1eqohpm/if_some...
Comment by Levitz 5 days ago
Sounds pretty relevant
Comment by JimDabell 5 days ago
Comment by Tiberium 5 days ago
This works because GPT 5.x actually properly use web search.
Comment by nottorp 5 days ago
Comment by Tiberium 5 days ago
Comment by mort96 5 days ago
Comment by Tiberium 5 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
> (infobox) Maximum luminosity 1×10^34/(cm2⋅s)
This is from the original design, LHC has been upgraded several times, e.g. if you check https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/accelerators/lhc-report-r..., you see "Thanks to these improvements, the instantaneous luminosity record was smashed, reaching 2.06 x 10^34 cm^(-2) s^(-1), twice the nominal value." and that was in 2017.
> The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 tera-electronvolts (TeV) per beam
This is wrong, if you check https://home.web.cern.ch/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-ab... it says "23 November 2009: LHC first collisions (see press release)" - https://home.web.cern.ch/news/press-release/cern/two-circula... and the energy was 450 GeV
Another random example, I was reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camponotus_japonicus (a very small article) and decided to ask GPT about it. It checked a lot of other sources and found out that no other source claims that this species of ant inhabits Iran.
Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(software_platform)
> and—until its discontinuation in JDK 9—a browser plug-in
In reality it was deprecated in JDK 9 and removed in JDK 11 - most people would think "discontinuation" means that it was already removed in JDK 9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nekopara
> The Opening theme for After, "Contrail" was composed by "Motokyio" and Sung by "Ceul".
Just two misspellings, it should be Motokiyo and Ceui
> A manga adaptation illustrated by Tam-U is currently being published
This section hasn't been updated, but the manga has already finished a long time ago.
===
Here's a direct part of GPT 5.1's response (I tried this back in November, so there was no GPT 5.2 yet) regarding luminosity, and it did also have a citation in the 2nd paragraph to the exact link I used above for the luminosity claim.
– The infobox lists “Maximum luminosity 1×10^34/(cm²·s)” without qualification.
– That number is the original design (nominal) peak luminosity for the LHC, but the machine has substantially exceeded it in routine operation: CERN operations reports show peak instantaneous luminosities of about 1.6×10^34 cm⁻²·s⁻¹ in 2016 and ≈2.0–2.1×10^34 cm⁻²·s⁻¹ in 2017–2018, roughly a factor of two above the nominal design.
– Since the same infobox uses the current maximum beam energy (6.8 TeV per beam) rather than the 7 TeV design value, presenting 1×10^34 cm⁻²·s⁻¹ as “Maximum luminosity” is misleading/outdated if read as the machine’s achieved maximum. It should either be labelled explicitly as “design luminosity” (with a note that higher values have been reached) or the numerical value should be updated to reflect the achieved peak.
Comment by sgc 5 days ago
As a technique though, never ask an LLM to find errors. Ask it to either find errors or verify that there are no errors. That way it can answer without hallucinating more easily.
Comment by 1718627440 5 days ago
What I do is both ask it to explain why there are no errors at all and why there tons of errors. Then I use my natural intelligence to reason about the different claims.
Comment by jMyles 5 days ago
On PickiPedia (bluegrass wiki - pickipedia.xyz), we've developed a mediawiki extension / middleware that works as an MCP server, and causes all of the contributions from the AI in question to appear as partially grayed out, with a "verify" button. A human can then verify and either confirm the provided source or supply their own.
It started as a fork of a mediawiki MCP server.
It works pretty nicely.
Of course it's only viable in situations where the operator of the LLM is willing to comply / be transparent about that use. So it doesn't address the bulk of the problem on WikiPedia.
But still might be interesting to some:
Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 5 days ago
A quote for the times.
May be a bit of a sisyphean task, though...
Comment by maxbaines 5 days ago
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Comment by jraph 5 days ago
Comment by tonymet 5 days ago
* no new Articles from LLM content (WP:NEWLLM)
* Most images wholly generated by AI should not be used." (WP:AILLM)
* “it is within admins' and closers' discretion to discount, strike, or collapse obvious use of generative LLMs" (WP:AITALK)
There doesn’t seem to be an outright ban on LLM content as long as it’s high quality .
Just an amateur summary for those less familiar with Wikipedia policy. I encourage people to open an account, edit some pages and engage in the community. It’s the single most influential piece of media that’s syndicated into billions of views daily, often without attribution.
Comment by crtasm 5 days ago
Comment by progbits 5 days ago
I would like a similar pre-LLM Wikipedia snapshot. Sometimes I would prefer potentially stale or incomplete info rather than have to wade through slop.
Comment by csande17 5 days ago
I'm not sure if it's real or not, but the Internet Archive has a listing claiming to be the dump from May 2022: https://archive.org/details/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2022-05
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
Comment by JKCalhoun 5 days ago
Comment by Antibabelic 5 days ago
Comment by progbits 5 days ago
Comment by kace91 5 days ago
Comment by KolmogorovComp 5 days ago
And I say that as a general Wikipedia fan.
Comment by philipwhiuk 5 days ago
Comment by vintermann 5 days ago
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
I've made a bunch of nontrivial changes (+- 1000s of characters), none of them seems to have been reverted, never asked for permission, I just went ahead and did it. Maybe the topics I care about are so non-controversial no one actually seen it?
Comment by tonymet 5 days ago
If you mean the left leaning tone / bias, that will be a bit more spicy. But general grammar, tone, ambiguity , superlatives – that’s the goal of copy editing.
I copy edit typesetting , for example.
Comment by KolmogorovComp 5 days ago
No, no I mainly mean non-neutral phrasing and/or too personal. Especially for people’s articles. (“And they released that greeeat album! But unfortunately the critics did not understand them… Booh!)
Comment by tonymet 5 days ago
I've found the best way to learn and contribute is to jump into an existing project. Usually direction is the hardest thing .
You can of course dive into an article and make changes, but you'll often get pushback (warranted or unwarranted) and that can be discouraging. It's a somewhat natural feedback loop.
Comment by KolmogorovComp 4 days ago
Comment by tonymet 4 days ago
Comment by alt227 5 days ago
Comment by KolmogorovComp 5 days ago
Comment by merelysounds 5 days ago
Curious, what are the signs that this particular page has been written by an AI?
I’m not saying it wasn’t, I’m probably not seeing something and wondering what to look for.
Comment by malfist 5 days ago
>Upon release, the album received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for Top's traditionalist approach and vocal authenticity, though some noted its adherence to familiar country frameworks.
Generic and uncited.
Comment by guywithahat 4 days ago
Comment by dfajgljsldkjag 5 days ago
Comment by mnming 5 days ago
Comment by shevy-java 5 days ago
Comment by bluebarbet 5 days ago
A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors.
AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem. I recently spent several hours rewriting a somewhat important article. I did not add or subtract information from the article, I simply made it clearer and more concise. I came away convinced that AI could have done as good a job - with supervision, of course - in a fraction of the time. AI-assisted copy-editing is not against Wikipedia rules. Yet as things stand, there are no built-in tools to facilitate it, doubtless because of the ambient suspicion of AI as a technology. We need to take a smarter approach.
Comment by oasisbob 5 days ago
I'm confused by this. Is this written by an AI?
> Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar.
This pile of words is missing a verb.
"You" (whoever that is, human or not) edited a single article, and that experience convinced you that "AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem"?
Ironically, the lack of evidence to support such a strong assertion is one of the key problems with AI writing in general.
The idea that you could edit an article extensively without adding or subtracting information is facile. I would love to see this edit.
Comment by bluebarbet 5 days ago
Comment by oasisbob 4 days ago
The example you put forth supporting your claim that AI is perfect for Wikipedia editing is that you (ambiguously) edited an article, perhaps using AI.
The post also reads like it was partially written with AI.
I'm sorry you see my response as hostile, but I hope you can see how this example isn't accomplishing your intended rhetorical goals.
Comment by bluebarbet 3 days ago
Meanwhile, my actual argument (which, like my Wikipedia contributions, involved no help from AI) was reasoned.
The real issue is that you (alone in this thread, I might add) are not taking my argument at face value. Indeed you seem to be accusing me of dishonesty. I must admit that I've never understood this kind of cynicism. I personally find it very easy to assume good faith on the part of others (which, incidentally, is a community rule here.). Anyway, that's all I have to say.
Comment by oasisbob 1 day ago
Have you, as an experienced Wikipedia editor ever used AI to revise articles? What was your experience?
Telling a story about editing an article once and thinking that AI could do it isn't as compelling.
Establishing ethos isn't the same thing as an appeal to authority.
Comment by ragazzina 5 days ago
And yet is completely understandable.
Comment by oasisbob 4 days ago
> Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar.
Repetition AND redundancy?
Illogical ordering in an unordered list of things.
Rambling (could be more items or less).
What's the grammar of a sentence like this? Diagramming it would be a challenge. I'd call that opaque.
Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P 5 days ago
Comment by tonymet 5 days ago
With a good model , fine tuning & supervision AI can produce stellar content.
AI is at least a thousand tools. It’s a mistake to write it off so trivially.
Comment by singinishi 5 days ago
Comment by juicytip 5 days ago
Comment by feverzsj 5 days ago
Comment by input_sh 5 days ago
Comment by jcattle 5 days ago
Comment by russnes 5 days ago
Comment by weli 5 days ago
Comment by csande17 5 days ago
That's why they're cataloging specific traits that are common in AI-generated text, and only deleting if it either contains very obvious indicators that could never legitimately appear in a real article ("Absolutely! Here is an article written in the style of Wikipedia:") or violates other policies (like missing or incorrect citations).
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
Comment by ramon156 5 days ago
Comment by PlatoIsADisease 5 days ago
I'm a embarrassed to be associated with US Millennials who are anti AI.
No one cares if you tie your legs together and finish a marathon in 12 hours. Just finish it in 3. Its more impressive.
EDIT:
I suppose people missed the first sentence:
>Isn't having a source the only thing that should be required.
>Isn't having a source the only thing that should be required.
>Isn't having a source the only thing that should be required.
Comment by PurpleRamen 5 days ago
And AI still can make up things, which might be fine in some random internet-comment, or some irrelevant article about something irrelevant happening somewhere in the world, but not with a knowledge-vault like Wikipedia.
And, we are talking here about Wikipedia. They are not just checking for AI, they are checking everything from everyone and have many many rules to ensure a certain level of quality. They can't check everything at once and fetch all problems immediately, but they are working step by step and over time.
> I'm a embarrassed to be associated with US Millennials who are anti AI.
You should be embarrassed for making such a statement.
Comment by IshKebab 5 days ago
It's not inherently bad, but if something was written with AI the chances that it is low effort crap are much much much higher than if someone actually spent time and effort on it.
Comment by simulator5g 4 days ago
Comment by alt227 5 days ago
No, referencing and discussing it properly whilst retaining the tone and inferred meaning are equally as important. I can cite anything as a source that I want, but if I use it incorrectly or my analysis misses the point of the source then the reference source itself is pointless.